Thursday, April 24, 2008
My first Post: Who am I?
It is only fair for me, to let you know right off the bat where I stand. First, I got into computers in the late seventies when the micro-computer evolved into what was to become the most significant event of the 20th Century, as far as I’m concerned. We’re only talking something like 25 years, not centuries here… But it brought about significant events that changed forever the world we live in today.
I seen many changes, but never as many as we have seen in the past five years with the move of just about everything on the Internet… This is a real fertile ground for Rants and Comments and that is just what I will do.
A bit of history. I have been and still am, a computer nut (or a geek, if you prefer), but not a down to Assembly Code type of Geek. I have played and dabbed most of my adult life with computers: I fell in love with them at University. Unfortunately, back then these were mainframes costing millions and no one would have ever though of getting one personally! Then came the micro-processor: wow that was extraordinary. My first computer was a Commodore Calculator, believe it or not! It blew me away. Yes, there were the HP Scientific Calculators with their Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) which I could never make sense of anyway! But I’m going astray here…
Then I heard of the Altair 8800, and others 8-bit machines… The first on I ever got was the magnificent an cheap Sinclair ZX81: data was saved (data was the BASIC program only) on a portable cassette deck… Wow! Wasn’t technology great!
My next computer was a TRS-80 Model 4 with a whopping 128K memory. Since it was running on a Zilog Z80, at that time these 8-bit machines could only address 64K of RAM: this guy was doing memory bank switching to access this memory. It was great. Since it was using the f and one half floppy diskettes, I spent a fortune to add then, a whooping 15 MB hard drive. I think that hard-drive was the size of a camp stove… it was huge…
Apple had their Apple II and IIe, but I was not into these as these were pretty costly. So I went for “IBM clones”: they were cheaper than the IBM PC and they really did were faster: IBM’s 8080 were running at 4 Mhz and the clones were blazingly fast at 8 Mhz. You even had a turbo button to kick it in high gear. But you had to watch to make sure that the games still were still running fine as in those days, every coder clocked its game to match the speed of the 4-Mhz…
And it went on from there. Since the clones were running MS-DOS, I continued on that path… to these past few years.
In a way I was (am still) a geek. I always dabbled in these machines and in what they could do, both at work and in private. The technology changed and I jumped on all of whatever Microsoft was bringing out. Let’s not forget that Microsoft was the under dog at that time… I was always blinded by whatever Microsoft bought out. I remember their first Windows… It came with DOS 5 I think and it was done on a regular CRT… horrible. Yes, Macintosh had come out and were not my cup of tea: Reboot OK? What the hell was that all about? I wanted to know what was going on. The idea of dragging icons into folders was truly foreign… I wanted my DOS prompt. I wanted to check the check the IRQs, to bit-twiddle the MS-DOS box… “No thank you”… Mac was not for me. But man, these DOS boxes made me swear a lot, though!
On the professional side, I worked with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Vaxes, Tandems Non-Stop machines (these are bizarre ones)… But I enjoyed Vaxes the most. I will time-warp to the time of Windows 3.11 for Workgroup (yes networking), but MS only as you had to get a separate TCP/IP stack from another vendor… Man what it ever fun to try to get to get all these things going on Windows 3.11: All the drivers had to be carefully loaded or else it would not work… “Why would anyone want this crap” might you ask? Well, I did… I loved this stuff… Still do… “Who the hell wants a machine that JUST work?” Hint: the Macs did… But that wasn’t for me.
Talking of Vaxes, the major reason I loved these was its Operating System:VMS. It really kicked asses. So much so, that the Head designer the VMS, David Cutler was brought over to Microsoft (Bill Gates needed a better OS) and the man designed and implemented Windows NT… Wow! NT (New Technology), an OS from MS not running on DOS!
Now I was sold… MS here I come… I wanted to be an MS guru, breathe MS only… These guys really were the tops in my book. I remember my first NT 3.5 machine: It was absolutely extraordinary running NT on a Pentium (never mind the Pentium bug) This was an OS… It really rocked… You could smell and taste VMS under the hood: Working Sets, Paged and Non-Paged, etc. VMS was written all over this thing! And it was sorlid…
Then NT 4 came in… which was the Win 95 look on NT… I never really like it that much though! But was much better than Win ‘95… Once I went to NT 3.5, I never went for anything with DOS, i.e the Win ‘95, ‘98 Series. Then came Windows 2000… That was an OS that I upgraded to asap as it offered the next best thing easily: the Internet. But being an early adopter of Windows 2K, I lived through the “non-existing”driver issues: none were ready… (Vista deja vu)?
Win2K, however, introduced a new and as far as I’m concerned, very scary concept: Keys and lots of them… I could eventually see the day where every piece of software, and the OS, of course, would be “rented”… “Hummm… Let’s just ignore that for the moment”, said I, “…and continue on the MS godliness.”.
Time for another Time-Warp… Professionally, I worked with Unix V7 on PDP-11’s. I truly enjoyed Unix, as it was fresh and since it reminded me a lot of Multics from Honeywell that we used at work on time-share systems. I had only found out later that the Unix developers had worked on that project from Bell Labs had actually coined the the term Unix as a ’smaller and less complex’ Multics…
If a regular PC was out of reach for me, the for sure anything with Unix would be Way Out of Reach. However, I dabbled and tried: QNX, Minix, and really liked Coherent.
Out of Time warp and into modern times…
What about today? The short answer is: a bunch of LapTops (desktops are a thing of the past) on Windows XP Pro (not the lobotomized Home), local servers on Linux (Debian). I also have spare drives for the LapTops with Ubuntu 7.10 on them, waiting for 8.04.
Now don’t let the above fool any of you… I have not revealed my cards to you yet.
Let the fun begin…
Regards…
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